It is night in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand memories. And the Place de la Concorde lies silver blue under springtime skies. And up the Champs Elysées the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist leaves like a million topaz tears. And the boulevards are a-thrill with the melody of living. Are you, now far away and deep in the American winter, with me once again in memory over the seas in this warm and wonderful and fugitive world? And do you hear with me again the twang of guitars come out the hedges of the Avenue Marigny? And do you smell with me the rare perfume of the wet asphalt and feel with me the wanderlust in the spirit soul of the Seine? Through the frost on the windows can you look out across the world and see with me once again the trysting tables in the Boulevard Raspail, a-whisper with soft and wondrous monosyllables, and can you hear little Ninon laughing and Fleurette sighing, and little Hélène (just passed nineteen) weeping because life is so short and death so long? Are you young again and do memories sing in your brain? And does the snow melt from the landscape of your life and in its place bloom again the wild poppies of the Saint Cloud roadways, telegraphing their drowsy, content through the evening air to Paris?
Or is the only rosemary of Paris that you have carried back with you the memory of a two-step danced with some painted bawd at the Abbaye, the memory of the night when you drank six quarts of champagne without once stopping to prove to the onlookers in the Rat Mort that an American can drink more than a damned Frenchman, the memory of that fine cut of roast beef you succeeded in obtaining at the Ritz?
Did I mention food? Ah-h-h, the night romance of Parisian nutriment! Parisian, said I. Not the low hybrid dishes of the bevy of British-American hotels that surround the Place Vendôme and march up the Rue de Castiglione or of such nondescripts as the Tavernes Royale and Anglaise—but Parisian. For instance, my good man, caneton à la bigarade, or duckling garnished with the oozy, saliva-provoking sauce of the peel of bitter oranges. There is a dish for you, a philter wherewith to woo the appetite! For example, my good fellow, sole Mornay (no, no, not the "sole Mornay" you know!), the sole Mornay whose each and every drop of shrimp sauce carries with it to palate and nostril the faint suspicion of champagne. Oysters, too. Not the Portuguese—those arrogant shysters of a proud line—but the Arcachons Marennes and Cancales supérieures: baked in the shell with mushrooms and cheese, and washed down exquisitely with the juice of grapes goldened by the French suns. And salmon, cold, with sauce Criliche; and artichokes made sentimental with that Beethoven-like fluid orchestrated out of caviar, grated sweet almonds and small onions; and ham boiled in claret and touched up with spinach au gratin. The romance of it—and the wonder!
But other things, alackaday, must concern us. Au 'voir, my beloveds, au 'voir! Au 'voir to thee, La Matelote, thou fair and fair and toothsome fish stew, and to thee, Perdreau Farci à la Stuért, thou aristocratic twelve-franc seducer of the esophagus! Au 'voir, my adored ones, au 'voir.
Voilà! And now again are we afield under the French moon. What if no more are the grisettes of Paul de Kock and Murger to fascinate the eye with wistful diableries? What if no more the old Vachette of the Boul' Mich' and the Rue des Ecoles, last of the cafés littéraires, once the guzzling ground of Voltaire and Rousseau and many such another profound imbiber? What if no more the simple Montmartroise of other times, and in her stead the elaborate wench of Le Coq d'Or, redolent of new satin and parfum Dolce Mia? Other times, other manners—and other girls! And if, forsooth, Ninette and Manon, Gabrielle and Fifi, arch little mousmés of another and mayhap lovelier day, have long since gone to put deeper soul into the cold harps of the other angels of heaven, there still are with us other Ninettes, other Manons and other Gabrielles and Fifis. "La vie de Bohéme" is but a cobwebbed memory: yet its hosts, though scattered and scarred, in spirit go marching on. The Marseillaise of romance is not stilled. In the little Yvette whose heart is weeping because the glass case in the Café du Dôme this day reveals no letter from her so grand André, gone to Cassis and there to transfer the sapphire of the sea and mesmerism of roses to canvas, is the heart of the little Yvette of the Second Empire. In the lips of Diane that smile and in the eyes of Hélène that dream and in the toes of Thérèse that dance is the smile, is the dream, is the dance in echo of the Paris of a day bygone.
Look you with me into the Rue de la Gaité, into the Gaité-Montparnasse, still comparatively liberated from the intrusion of foreign devils, and say to me if there is not something of old Paris here. Not the Superba, Fantasma Paris of Anglo-Saxon fictioneers, not the Broadwayed, Strandified, dandified Paris of the Folies-Bergère and the Alcazar, but the Paris still primitive in innocent and unbribed pleasure. And into the Bobino, its sister music hall of the common people, where the favourite Stradel and the beloved Berthe Delny, "petite poupée jolie," as she so modestly terms herself, bring the grocer and his wife and children and the baker and his wife and children temporarily out of their glasses of Bock to yell their immense approval and clap their hands. I have heard many an audience applaud. I have heard applause for Tree at His Majesty's in London, for Schroth at the Kleines in Berlin, for Féraudy at the Comédie Française, for Skinner at the Knickerbocker—and it was stentorian applause and sincere—but I have never heard applause like the applause of the audience of these drabber halls. The thunders of the storm king are as a sonata against the staggering artillery of approbation when Pharnel of the Montparnasse sings "C'est pas difficile"; the howlings of the north wind are as zephyrs against the din of eulogy when Marius Reybas of the Bobino lifts a mighty larynx in "Mahi Mahi." Great talent? Well, maybe not. But show me a group of vaudevillians and acrobats who, like this group at the Gaité, can amuse one night with risqué ballad and somersault and the next with Molière—and not be shot dead on the spot!
Leave behind you Fysher's, where the smirking monsieur fills the red upholstery with big-spending American hinds by warbling into their liquored bodies cocoa butter ballades of love and passion, and come over to the untufted Maillol's. And hear Maillol sing for the price of a beer. Maillol's lyrics are not for the American virgin: but, at that, they sing laughter in place of Fysher lech. Leave behind you Paillard's, vainglorious in its bastard salades Danicheff, its soufflés Javanaise; leave the blatant Boulevard des Italiens for the timid bistrop of Monsieur Delmas in the scrawny Rue Huygens, with its soupe aux legumes at twenty centimes the bowl, its cotelette de veau at fifty the plate. A queer oasis, this, with old Delmas's dog suffering from the St. Vitus and quivering against the tables as you eat; with its marked napkins in a rack, like the shaving cups in a rural barber shop, one napkin a week to each regular patron. Avaunt, ye gauds of Americanized Paris. Here are poor and starving artists come to dine aristocratically on seventy-five centimes—fifteen cents. Here are no gapings of Cook's; here no Broadway prowlers. A dank hole, yes, but in its cracked plaster the sense of Romany sunsets of yonder times. Leave behind the dazzling dance places of theatrical Montmartre, American, and come back of the wine shop in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève! Leave behind the turning mill wheel, American, and come into the Avenue de Choisy, where over a preglacial store a couple of cornets baffle the night and set a hundred feet in motion, feet from the Gobelin quarter, feet from the Butte-aux-Cailles! More leathery feet, to be sure, than the suéde feet of the Ziegfeld Montmartre, but kicking up a different wax dust, the wax dust of a different Paris.